there's little on it but there was a manuscript found in Trau, copied by an aristocrat's scribe from earlier documents, the origin of which being unknown :/
The answer is simple, it did not. The surviving text, with the exception of a single, longer scene often copied as a standalone work, hasn't made it to our times. It's a discontinuous patchwork of various pieces, which are known to have been a coherent narrative. Unlike most authors who suffered from the wearing effect of time, there are evidences that Petronius was mutilated, with countless passages removed, overwritten or shortened on purpose. Petronius however was known in learned society-his poetry was abundant, and he's mentioned several times in Anthologia Latina, Isidore of Seville, or Fulgentius-so it is known that a large number of manuscripts circulated. A notable class of manuscripts copied in Italy in the fourteenth century for example show less than a third of the total length, carefully removing any mention of homosexuality, which can be deduced from narrative incoherence; for example, a hand removed all the text between 8.4 and 9.4, from “dedissem poenas” to “cum ego proclamarem,” describing an attempted male-on-male rape on Giton, but failed to notice that the narrator changed there, leaving a shift in speakers unaccounted for. For a comprehensive overview, please read Wade T. Richardson, “Reading and Variant in Petronius: Studies in the French Humanists and their Manuscript Sources,” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993 or, for a shorter summary, Gareth Schmeling's translation in the Loeb Classical Library collection, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020, 22-50.
How did the Satyricon survive, as it is full of content that a monk would find inappropriate?
by the grace of God 😂
there's little on it but there was a manuscript found in Trau, copied by an aristocrat's scribe from earlier documents, the origin of which being unknown :/
Monks weren't the little angels you think.
The answer is simple, it did not. The surviving text, with the exception of a single, longer scene often copied as a standalone work, hasn't made it to our times. It's a discontinuous patchwork of various pieces, which are known to have been a coherent narrative. Unlike most authors who suffered from the wearing effect of time, there are evidences that Petronius was mutilated, with countless passages removed, overwritten or shortened on purpose. Petronius however was known in learned society-his poetry was abundant, and he's mentioned several times in Anthologia Latina, Isidore of Seville, or Fulgentius-so it is known that a large number of manuscripts circulated. A notable class of manuscripts copied in Italy in the fourteenth century for example show less than a third of the total length, carefully removing any mention of homosexuality, which can be deduced from narrative incoherence; for example, a hand removed all the text between 8.4 and 9.4, from “dedissem poenas” to “cum ego proclamarem,” describing an attempted male-on-male rape on Giton, but failed to notice that the narrator changed there, leaving a shift in speakers unaccounted for.
For a comprehensive overview, please read Wade T. Richardson, “Reading and Variant in Petronius: Studies in the French Humanists and their Manuscript Sources,” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993 or, for a shorter summary, Gareth Schmeling's translation in the Loeb Classical Library collection, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020, 22-50.